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Former Spotify innovation chief raises $5.5M for Shibuya music app startup A Vinyl Bar

Máuhan M Zonoozy, Spotify's former head of innovation, has raised $5.5 million in pre-seed funding for A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building small music-making apps that deliberately avoid generative AI prompts.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-15 00:20

The round drew participation from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital, ERA, Common Metal, Gold House, Liquid 2 Ventures, Breakers VC, Systemic Ventures, and Dawn Ostroff, Spotify's former chief content and advertising business officer, who joined the company as an advisor.

Zonoozy left Spotify in 2024. Before that he founded Bubbl, a video clipping and remixing startup acquired by Cricket Media. He said he always wanted to go back to building something of his own, and that while streaming solved the access problem, most interaction with music was still around consumption.

"I think when I looked at emergent behaviors and younger audiences, like everyone's growing up playing with culture through games, through filters, through creation tools. And I just felt like there was an opportunity to empower people to do something similar with music," he told TechCrunch.

The startup releases its experiments like "singles" that are part of an album. The common theme is interacting with different elements to create music or modify sound. Speed Surfer is a Chrome extension that changes the speed and filter of audio playing in a browser window. Usersound is a website where users create an "audio" username with each letter representing a note. Stacks is a stem player where mixes are built by turning bars on or off in a 3x3 grid. Drops involves placing plaques in a pattern to deflect falling marbles, which produces musical notes. Sampler turns YouTube videos into music samplers based on beats from different parts of the songs.

The company's more ambitious product is an iOS app called bop. It lets users place musical instruments and effects in a grid to create different mixes of a base song, adjust tempo and add one-time effects, and export the results to TikTok or Instagram. A multiplayer version that would let users remix songs with others is also in the works.

Zonoozy said the company is making an informed choice not to infuse AI into every part of these apps, though he is open to using AI to build the products and to make infrastructure solid. "AI is obviously extraordinarily powerful, but I think we just don't necessarily believe that the future of music is simply generation, like song generation via AI," he said. "And I think if AI starts to make that content more abundant, it actually makes taste and human perspective and interaction and participation even more important and even more valuable. And we're just trying to make sure it doesn't make it even rarer."

This year the company aims to release a "musical sandbox mixer" product that would let users play around with different elements of music-making, including being able to create instruments.